Media

Top mags for hitting the slopes

Did you hear the one about George Washington’s little-known ski trip? Of course you haven’t, because we just made it up. Neverthless, Presidents Day does seem like a nice chance to get away to the slopes. Folks heading up north can have fun, even if they’ll never think of our first president as “The Father of the Giant Slalom.”

On title alone, Transworld Snowboarding, seems like a perfect fit for Olympic-year festivities. But it’s for a younger crowd, a crowd that may not even know there’s a world out there. For evidence as to the target age group, consider the firsthand story about making out in the skate bowl. “Traveling kicks ass and so does snowboarding” is one profundity. The action pictures, meanwhile, are great. Then again, what would a winter sports mag be like without a photo of someone upside down and in apparent danger of calamity? If Shangri-La is your idea of, well, Shangri-La, check out the feature on the Himalayas. Look out, though. The feature’s first word, ‘gravity,’ is spelled ‘gavity.’

If the previous mag is for dudes, then Powder is for the parents of the dudes. How about a feature on the dated art of monoskiing? Never heard of monoskiing. Well, it went out of style when snowboarding became popular. The “skinny-ski” comeback, and a full-page advertisement for adult ski camps, might also appeal to a certain g-g-generation. Lots of pictures of Alaska, as some in this crowd hopefully can afford the trip. Looking for a party? The mag recommends Austria’s Hahnenkamm. Apparently this is to the ski world what Panama City, Fla., is to spring break.

Skiing magazine is more about the professional variety. The layout is much better than that of its peers, looking a bit like Wired Magazine. There is a pictorial on Olympic-level gear. Then comes a treatment of the Sochi Games, a story on how the Olympic Committee will not let athletes promote sponsors at the Games. More sordid (hey, it’s their headline, not ours) is a look at the dating scene in a ski town. Bottom line? It’s a small world, and the minute you break up, everyone knows your stuff. Elsewhere is a Q&A with USA freeskiing team member Tom Wallisch. Words seem less abundant around the four full-page head shots of dedicated skiiers who are the magazine’s case studies.

Would you pay $5.99 to read a fluffy Q&A with Shaun White? Credit Snowboarder with landing the big interview to coincide with the Sochi Games. Still, some of the questions are very technical, and the small font of the copy makes it very hard to read. “Does it [being Shaun White] ever get to be too much?” the magazine asks. “Yeah,” White answers. A bit more expansive is a feature called “The “Riders of the Year,” which starts with No. 10 Scott Stevens and counts down to, well, we won’t spoil the ending. Some sequence photography makes for good viewing.

In this grim, twilight age for books, the media chant incessantly that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a “genius.” This week, the New Yorker reminds us that Bezos began with books not from a love of reading but from a love of harvesting consumer data. As Bezos has systematically dismantled the publishing industry in the name of eliminating the middleman, US Attorney General Eric Holder, the federal courts and even President Obama have backed him. Obama has plugged Amazon as a job creator, but net-net, the stats don’t bear that out. Holder is convinced that lower book prices are what matter for readers. But publishers “are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas,” George Packer notes. “When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good?”

New York seems to be just as worried as everybody else that Mayor de Blasio is an old-line Democrat hack who’s going to blow it by overreaching. The matter of urgency this week is whether de Blasio can cut a national figure. This would seem to depend on whether he blows it by overreaching, according to reporter Chris Smith. We tend to agree, with respect to his plan to soak the rich for the citywide pre-K program, as well as his upcoming talks with labor unions. “Shifting city government’s values to the left won’t matter if de Blasio can’t get the dollars and cents right and ends up becoming a spendthrift captive of the old Democratic interest groups.” Elsewhere in this week’s double issue, the city’s new Democratic interest groups are treated to generous coverage on food, fashion and entertainment.

Time’s cover story focuses on a new computer called D-Wave 2. It’s being billed as the “infinity machine,” which purports to operate at the quantum mechanical level to generate mind-blowingly fast calculations. To make it happen, the top of the article informs us that the temperature inside the gadget is reduced near absolute zero to -459.6 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s nearly 2 degrees lower than the temperature inside the Boomerang Nebula, which was previously thought to be the coldest place in the universe. That humans could make this happen seems pretty impressive, but if you’re wondering how they did it, you’ll have to search elsewhere. Instead, we get too much mumbo-jumbo about ones and zeroes and the uncertainty principle, not to mention the uncertainty of whether this computer will actually work and when.